


I Know What's Real

by CookieCatSU



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:19:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25123048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CookieCatSU/pseuds/CookieCatSU
Summary: What mattered was real, even if everything around him was fake. Merle knows it's real, because it's a mess and he's a mess and everything's a mess, and he appreciates that. The authenticity of it all.
Relationships: Merle Highchurch/The Hunger | John
Kudos: 14





	I Know What's Real

  


None of it was real: molten sunsets, and sterile offices and grainy beaches, and writhing masses of fire hot vengeance, opal hearted and rainbow veined, sitting just at the edge of a one-way mirror. Rippling mirages, just as quick to dispel as they are to be conjured, thinning out like the smoke they are stitched from.

  


Water laps at his feet, and he knows it's not real. As real as the water pitcher, the chessboard, constructed out of nothing, from nowhere, to serve a purpose. Hold the engine. Sooth the mind. Present some normality.

  


But, then John turns to him, a sad little smile curling his lips, and he knows that's real. He laughs, and they lean on each other's shoulders, and that's real. This is real. Even if everything else isn't.

  


What counted, what mattered, was real.

  


They sit at the table, half a room apart, and the man stares him down with fire in his eyes, black and merciless, so angry… and that was real too.

  


Real and ugly and nasty.

  


* * *

  


They sit together at the table. A little table, cluttered and messy, in a little kitchen, also cluttered and messy and blooming with flowers and ferns, tucked into the corners, hiding on shelves, nestled comfortably next to the doors. Green. Alive. Merle clasps John's hands, the little dwarf so bright and alive. As bursting as his home.

  


John is mundane and plain, in comparison. Mute greys, and engulfing blacks, and steady practicality, cynicality at the ready. Sun to his moon. Earth to his sky, Merle would say.

  


"I'm no good" John says, and it's an unarguable fact. No more. No less, to say. 

  


He grips Merle's hand a little tighter, and his pain, his grief, shows as little more than a disgruntled furrow of his brow, a sore lip.

  


Merle, nothing's too fucked up Merle, is not dissuaded.

  


"Maybe your not" He shrugs, "Or maybe you never took the time to see it, the good, I mean"

  


Dark grey eyes remain unconvinced. He nearly pulls away, with a noise of disgust- who it's directed at, neither will ever really know.

  


Merle pulls him back, and holds him there, keeps the eye of the Ascendant, turned beast, turned graying old human sitting hunched in knitted sweater. Now that he's been subjected to aging once more- no longer a bug trapped, suspended, in amber: His eyes have become dark, his face, his hands, his back, now mottled with scars, faint crinkled lines where the universe once lay, blinding stars ripping all apart.

  


Steadfast, and tired and weathered.

  


Yet, Merle doesn't care. He's as beautiful as the day he first met him.

  


Merle states, firm, "I want you, _all_ of you"

  


Every last bit. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The mean and the hateful, and the dissatisfied and the _hungry_. The smiles and the laughter, rare as they come. The biting wit, and scathing words. All. Because that was what made him, all of them, real.

  


John smiles, genuine and faint, enough to make even glass crack. 

  


And it's real. That's real.

  


He squeezes the hand in his grip.

  


And Merle smiles back. 

  


He wants this. Wants something _real_.

  


* * *

  


The sun slowly begins to rise behind them, shining through half smudged windows.

  


  



End file.
